no fly zone

Flies are everywhere in Malaysia

I went to Puchong, amid the low cost flats, to find that shop that had all those flies on the beef slabs. They did not have any beef for sale today but had loads of fish. As you can see in the photo there were a lot of flies on the fish so all those poor people living nearby who buy this fly bacteria infested food will definitely face some health problems. I won’t be surprised if their children do not do well in school either because of the contaminated food they will be eating. You may say that the bacteria is killed during cooking but I tell you that the toxins left behind by the bacteria may not be neutralized by cooking.

It was in June / July 2014 when I first noticed this as I was running around all over town to get some samples of beef and mutton. You see, as I was helping my Muslim friend’s restaurant, I had suggested to him that the ‘chefs’ stop using Ramly Burgers and make their own. This is because every road side stall was using Ramly burgers to make burgers so how can a good restaurant serve the same Ramly burgers too? Why should we be competing with these road side stalls as our prices would be much higher? As a restaurant, my friend should not allow the use of Ramly burger but instead use real beef or real mutton and make fresh burgers. At this point I decided to try out those wonderful burger recipes on page one of Google search engine results. They looked delicious and tempting. So I did try, BBC recipes, Marth Stewart recipes, Australian recipes …etc as they were supposed to be the best in the world.

Guess what? Those recipes tasted bland. No flavor. No beef flavor. No mutton flavor. Wasn’t that shocking? The best recipes in the world resulted in ‘nothing great but bland’ and ‘why did I buy these’ types of burgers. That is when I began to search for tasty meat and went to many butchers and wet markets around Klang Valley to search for better quality meat. In fact I even went to the mamak (Indian Muslim) restaurants and asked them why there was no beef flavor or mutton flavor in their meat dishes? You know you are eating meat but there is hardly any flavor of beef or mutton. It was the same with the Chinese beef ball noodles. The sauce and the spices and everything else had flavor but very little meat flavor. That was the day I realized that we are importing very low quality meat into Malaysia.

Those flies I saw in 2014 were huge and double the size of those in the picture and there are a lot less flies today. I do regret not taking photos of them in 2014. Those I saw today were half the size at about half an inch in length. Both the flies in 2014 and today, 2016, had a greenish coloured thorax – depending on the angle of the light. I have not seen these types of flies in Klang Valley, only here, in that location in Puchong. This means I am looking at the descendants of the 2014 flies. A fly life span is 28 days so let me wait another two weeks and sneak in to photograph them again. The other explanation could be that beef fattens flies faster than fish. So feeding fish to the flies will slow down their growth? My understanding is that insects never stop growing so smaller flies indicate less nutritional food source.

Do note how many flies are enjoying fishing in the photo. This is the art of fly fishing.